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A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return

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Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return

#171

Post by DeluluDon »

fragmede wrote: post #170
ChuckMcM wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if farms went 100% from agriculture to solar we wouldn't have enough food :-) And we'd have anywhere from 100x to 1000x the entire power demand of the planet in energy. Solar has a $/acre value (which at the moment is pretty high in California) but as more Solar came on line that would go down. And like any crop they would figure out what they needed to maximize profits. It might also spur the development of 100…

Why not both? Agrivoltaics or dual-use solar has farmers putting solar panels on the fields, and sometimes finding it improves their yields!

Is it just me or do you desperately need electricity to live?

Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return

#172

Post by anon7000 »

interactivecode wrote: post #133
kbenson wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If farms would choose to do solar instead of crops, I would assume that's because they can get more $/acre, but that could cause food prices to rise. At the same time, energy prices would drop if there was a surplus, so I wonder where it would level out. Lower energy cost could have a small affect in reducing the price of processed foods, but I imagine it would be very small (but I don't really know the energy cost o…

I sometimes wonder what would happen to our other resources if energy was abundant and "free". For example desalination plants running for free could perhaps be used to refill an aquifer. Of course there are markets and balances in the real world. The idea that energy is always scarce and that we shouldn't produce more than I as an individual need always feels a bit like maintaining scarcity. often energy storage has…

This is why we have to invest so much more into solar. Any kind of fossil fuel or even nuclear energy is constrained by scarcity.

You put in a natural gas power plant, now you are reliant on someone going out and digging for oil, shipping it back, you burning it, and repeat indefinitely.

I put Nuclear in this group because firstly it’s incredibly expensive to build and operate nuclear plants. And you are still consuming water and fuel, and producing waste. That’s a huge production chain just to keep it operating.

There is scarcity at every step to operate these plants. Scarcity of labor, scarcity of fuel that you’re going to burn, scarcity of water, scarcity of waste storage, scarcity of parts to maintain the plants. There is a limit to how cheap it can get.

With solar, you can buy a panel for cheap, leave it on the grass, and get power for 30 years with practically no maintenance. Even wind or hydro have moving parts to service. For solar, the most you ever have to do is the equivalent of cleaning a window.

There is practically no scarcity. Even if it’s just being able to buy a panel… well, the supply of panels only ever increases. They are increasingly recyclable. They are not consumable, complicated products that you burn up or which break apart in a couple years.

Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return

#173

Post by ChuckMcM »

fragmede wrote: post #170
ChuckMcM wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if farms went 100% from agriculture to solar we wouldn't have enough food :-) And we'd have anywhere from 100x to 1000x the entire power demand of the planet in energy. Solar has a $/acre value (which at the moment is pretty high in California) but as more Solar came on line that would go down. And like any crop they would figure out what they needed to maximize profits. It might also spur the development of 100…

Why not both? Agrivoltaics or dual-use solar has farmers putting solar panels on the fields, and sometimes finding it improves their yields!

In my original comment I linked the nature study that looked at farmers doing both. The "but if we don't plant crops we'll starve!" argument is just silly for a number of reasons, one I pointed out which is if we used all land arable land just in California for solar panels + batteries we'd have 1,000 times as much power available as the entire world demand today. Who would even buy that power? Nobody. The thing that keeps this from happening is that as more solar power comes online its cost goes down and it becomes uneconomical to add more (farmer's won't put it in because they can make more money growing beans or something). So no, allowing farmers to put in solar instead of crops will never lead to a famine due to nobody growing food. People are too greedy :-). There is a large ConAgra farm in the central valley that lobbies a lot (they want more water for Almonds because $$) and a back of the envelope calculation shows they could convert half their acreage to solar, use that to desalinate water off the coast of Point Magu, and pump it to the other half of their acreage and not need any water delivered from the California watershed. It sounds crazy but its the new reality of what you can do with solar and batteries. China (as a government policy directive) has figured this out before anyone else btw.

Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return

#174

Post by riedel »

voakbasda wrote: post #52
rayiner wrote: post #30

Why can't we work up the political outrage over water-wasting agriculture in California that we managed to gin up over data centers: https://finance.biggo.com/news/202508220112_Data_Centers_vs_... > Alfalfa irrigation (Colorado River): 1.6 trillion gallons annually > Google data centers (global): 6.4 billion gallons in 2023 > Thermoelectric power plants: 41% of total US water use EDIT: that page has a correction to s…

Even worse, my understanding is that much of that alfalfa gets put into shipping containers and sold overseas. The agricultural drain on the aquifers does not even benefit US ranchers.

Even worse: this is going to cattle farms that are responsible for considerable amount of methane emissions contributing to global warming.

Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return

#175

Post by nate_meurer »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #169
nate_meurer wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Water which is evaporated is also returned to the ecosystem. It falls back out as rain. This is about as useful as saying "the water stays on Earth". The ecological damage entirely depends on the nature of the water source. The most poignant situation is non-rechargeable aquifers. When water is extracted, the mineral structures collapse and the storage capacity is forever destroyed. And as the other reply stated, e…

> This is about as useful as saying "the water stays on Earth". That is actually an important distinction. There are many things for which this is not the case. If you fail to recover the helium extracted with natural gas deposits then it doesn't stay on Earth. If birds eat your crops, you can't undo it. If you burn coal then it turns into CO2 and heat and it's thermodynamically impossible to reverse the process with…

That's a good point, and good examples. I'd compare the destruction of aquifers (some of them anyway) as akin to those things.

Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return

#176

Post by andsoitis »

rayiner wrote: post #30

Why can't we work up the political outrage over water-wasting agriculture in California that we managed to gin up over data centers: https://finance.biggo.com/news/202508220112_Data_Centers_vs_... > Alfalfa irrigation (Colorado River): 1.6 trillion gallons annually > Google data centers (global): 6.4 billion gallons in 2023 > Thermoelectric power plants: 41% of total US water use EDIT: that page has a correction to s…

> Why can't we work up the political outrage over water-wasting agriculture in California that we managed to gin up over data centers

Agriculture produces food.

Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return

#178

Post by altcognito »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #6
altcognito wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

? The land isn't conserved if you can't use it?

Conservation is basically defined as being unused by humans.

I don't know why you got downvoted. In any case, this makes "sense", but doesn't make sense in that if we nuke the land in some way, distort it from a peaceful balance, I don't think it is "conserved"

Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return

#179

Post by protocolture »

smcin wrote: post #120
protocolture wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Data-centre protests aren't about water >I suspect the people facing rising electricity cost and air-noise pollution beg to differ. Pulling myself together here to be as polite as possible but could you perhaps read the quoted text and your own post again and try and square that circle? Otherwise, are you perhaps in the running for some kind of internet non sequitur award I am unaware of? I would vote for your comm…

Residential users' water bills aren't (currently) affected by datacenter-related demand, unlike their power bills which are. The resource contention for water is between datacenters and agribusiness (or other industrial users), not residential users. Instead of being sarcastic to GP's post, we could try to find a succinct explanation of how water rights are owned/sold/taxed in the US. This seems to be a patchwork qui…

Doesnt that mean that the statement "Datacenter protests arent about water" is correct?

Re: A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return

#180

Post by NoRagrets »

Agriculture is important. Alfafa is important as it feeds most of the animals grown for food and anlso horses etc.

90% of American alfafa is used domestically and only around 3-5% of it is exported.

The problem is California. 31% of California alfafa is exported and this is a state that has declared drought many times before. It’s a water thirsty state with grandfathered Ag water for farmers who essentially export water.

California Ag is the problem. We need agriculture. We need alfalfa. We need to fix CA.

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